aussie, aussie, aussie! oi, oi, oi!

as i write this next episode of my blog i am sitting under the quietly greying skies of an Australian afternoon in a place called Byron Bay. i am looking out at a small peaceful lake, whilst people lazily swing in hammocks around me. Lizards trot by my feet, and brush turkeys stalk around imperiously, occasionally pausing to scratch inquisitively at the ground, without seeming to find much of interest. I can hear 3 types of music from 3 different directions- to my far right African drums are being played in the campsite, to my left and 2 tables away from me are 3 guys jamming (pretty nicely actually) with acoustic guitars, and there is a distant hum of some kind of pan pipe or yoga tune being played out of the hostel sound system, just audible but not quite identifiable. the music should be an assault on my senses, but all 3 are melding quite beautifully together and its actually very relaxing.

i’ve got a feeling that this is known as ‘The Byron Bay Experience’, and i’m mighty glad that I bought those harem pants, because they have enabled me to slot into place pretty well. Byron is a hippy haven, full of happy souls who seem to have adopted the attitude that travelling is not about getting to any destination, it is far more a state of mind. the town itself is busy and bustling, but ‘bustling’ with people wandering gently in tie-dye skirts and board shorts, to the beach or the latest reiki session rather than in a ‘London bustling’ way. it is actually pretty vibrant- the buildings are colourful, the people are colourful, the shops restaurants and bars are varied and enticing and people seem to be spending not just time but also money here, and generally living the good life.

the hostel we are staying at, the infamous Arts Factory, is equally ’hippy friendly’, and describes itself as a resort- the sprawling area has every kind of sleeping option for the budget traveller, from camping space, to dorms, to communal teepees, to static tents, to double bedrooms and even a converted disused bus. there is pool, a café (which i am sitting outside now) a swamp, nightly tours of some sort (bushtucker, spider, etc) and signs directing people to a didgeridoo pit (though i’m yet to see very much action coming from there, and not sure what action happens in a ‘Didge Pit’ anyway…).
i get the distinct impression that many of the ‘travellers’ here have been pretty static for quite a while- the place almost has the feel of a commune apart from the slick reception set up and everyone’s neat little labelled food bags in the industrial fridges (no sense of ‘what’s yours is mine dude’ when it comes to backpackers and their food!). if it wasn’t for the nightly onslaught of bugs and mosquitos i reckon i could set up camp here for quite a time aswell. as it is, my peaceful reverie is being quite regularly interrupted by a desperate urge to scratch one of the many growing welts all over my body (i even have a bite in the middle of my forehead- that is just unreasonable behaviour from mozzies! although it does explain why the husband suddenly, out of nowhere, slapped me in the head yesterday. he said he saw a mozzie, I thought he may have just been bored by my conversation, but thankfully the proof that it was the former lies in the little red bite on my head.)

but i am jumping ahead- taking you to halfway through my Australia experience without explaining first how we got here and which roads we have travelled to bring us here.

we landed in Brisbane, slightly shellshocked after a day spent in airports, and leapt straight in our new hire car to escape the rush hour and skyscrapers before we got overwhelmed by the sight of so many people in one place (New Zealand can do that to you!). it instantly became apparent the new hire car cannot possibly be called Grover 2- it is brand new, red, curvy, sparkling and sexy. it can go fast without squealing in protest. it is so unlike Grover that i’m too scared to drive it yet. we headed straight up to our first stop of the trip- Hervey Bay- and after a few more hours of travelling checked ourselves in at 9.45pm to a dark and pretty much deserted behemoth of a hostel. the morning dawned promising, but swiftly started drizzling, so we had a quick recce of the town, checked out the stunning beach (not quite as stunning in the rain but we saw its potential) and then escaped the grey skies for a delicious lunch at a nearby café. we had arranged to hook up with a fellow traveller from our previous ‘Big Trip’- the lovely Bruce who the husband and i had both spent some time with on our travels 8 years previous. he lives not far from Hervey Bay, and it was great to see a familiar face, and catch up on old times and new times and sink a few beers until the sun went down.

we then had our Fraser Island trip induction in the evening- something that has been filling me with excitement and consternation in equal measure since we started planning the whole adventure. we had decided early on that we definitely wanted to ‘do Fraser’, and in the traditional way (ie. in a small group, in 4x4s, camping and roughing it and drinking copious amounts along the way). however, we have heard the odd horror story from friends of being stuck with a massive group of crazed gap-yearers, fresh out of school and parental clutches and desperate to drink from dawn till dusk, and then through till dawn again for 3 days straight and listen to dodgy house music, and i really didn’t want to be the ‘boring old fogeys’ who wanted to stop drinking at some point and actually see the highlights of the heritage sight that is the island. to be honest, i was worried that we might not hack their pace, and they may not appreciate ours. everyone acknowledges that the enjoyment of the tour is totally dependent on being in a good, likeminded group, and after much comparing of various companies and different options we had taken a rather huge leap of faith (and dumped quite a large portion of our money!) and were just keeping our fingers crossed that it would be ok.
as it turned out, it became swiftly apparent at the induction that we would be just fine. our group was to be led by a friendly gap toothed and weather beaten German called Hans, who instantly told us that the island’s aboriginal name translates as ‘the most beautiful paradise on earth’ and that he had not done a tour for 2 days and was already desperately missing the place. our fellow tour-ers were a young Irish guy called Marvin who seemed up for the craic, a group of 3 Flemish girls in their early twenties (who we had earlier seen checking in a massive crate of Stella and a bottle of champagne so we had no worries about them either), an English Will, who totally randomly is the little brother of a friend of mine from uni, (whose path we had crossed some 5 years earlier and enjoyed a BBQ and drunken evening with in Durban, so we knew he was also sound), and a last and minute addition of 3 quieter dutch (a couple and their friend), who seemed enthusiastic if a little tongue tied. So we were a group of 11, including lead driver Hans, all in our middle twenties (excluding Hans and the husband of course, who just teeters into the 30-something territory!), and we all seemed to have a sense of humour, be excited about actually seeing the island and up for some drinks in the evening without wanting to totally obliterate ourselves. i finally relaxed, and with all consternation gone could focus on just being excited!

after spending the evening in the hostel bar with Will and Marvin, eating a late night Subway on the beach and spotting a massive friendly possum up a tree (my first live one, after so many dead flat ones in New Zealand! hurrah!) we set off in the morning to pack up our trucks with food to last us 3 days and 2 nights. i played Mother in the car park, collecting money for the kitty from all of the tour group, and Brendan and i set about attempting a decisive shop whilst being trailed by 9 other people. this is quite a tricky thing to do, especially when you don’t know those 9 people from Adam, and are trying to cater to all tastes. one of the dutch, David, said he was a vegetarian, but happy to eat meat (?) so we were worried about him and whether there was some kind of language breakdown. i spent a good 15 minutes trying to pick a cereal that everyone would like, and that would be cheap enough to match our budget but big enough to last the weekend (I settled in the end on Homebrand cornflakes and Homebrand coco pops, neither of which got eaten). and the 3 flemish girls kept picking up multiples of everything we decided on, with the confident turn of phrase “Ah, but we eat A LOT!”. they reassured us that we would need at least 12 loaves of sliced bread (we compromised on 10), 3 litres of yoghurt, and about 45 fresh tomatoes. i reassured them that we would need 2 kilos of cheese, 850 grams of nutella and we were all happy. we all agreed on a secret birthday cake for Isabelle, one of the Flemish, whose birthday was that day. once we had completed our trip to the bottle store, returning triumphant with 8.4 litres of wine in 2 goon bags (an aussie expression for a box of wine, and so much more expressive and emotive i think!) to add to the bottle of Bundaberg rum that Bruce had given us (enough for 2 people for 2 nights we thought- we didn’t want to be the boring fogeys after all!), we set off to the island.

it is just as beautiful and special as everyone says, and at this stage it is probably best to summarise only highlights, so here goes:
- swimming in Lake Mackenzie on arrival at the island, water so clear that it just reflected the bright blue sky and seemed to go on forever, surrounded by new found friends and revelling in the bright sunshine. refreshing, reviving and immense.
- driving down 75 mile beach, over masses of flat powdery sand, with the tide out and the windows down, Chili Peppers on the stereo.
- wading down Eli Creek, thigh deep but clear and warm, to the sound of birds flapping and squawking in the trees just above our heads
- getting to know everyone over the goon bags, drunkenly BBQing together in the dark, celebrating Isabelle’s birthday with her surprise chocolate mud cake and instigating drinking games with the rum.
- cursing the rum and the drinking games the following morning in my tent as the sun got higher and the temperature rose to ‘unbearable’ way before i was ready to be upright… or even awake.
- Indian heads- a stunning lookout point on the east side of the island, as far north as we could drive. we didn’t see any sharks or whales, but watching the waves crashing into the cliffs and feeling the spray as a fine mist dusting my face from their very peak was a great way to shake off the rum hangover.
- the champagne pools- natural rock pools where the incoming waves create a Jacuzzi effect. really awesome to see the quirks of mighty nature, despite sustaining some barnacle scraping injuries on my butt after a particularly large wave.
- setting up camp in the middle of the beach and cooking up a mean spag bol, whilst being eagerly watched by a mamma dingo and her pups- magical, even if we were beset by massive and persistent black biting flies until the sun went down.
- walking through the rainforest , dodging raindrops which seemed amplified by the forest canopy, until we broke through at Lake Waddy. this lake was totally different to Lake Mackenzie, but i found it even more beautiful- it was a deep green, closely surrounded on one side by overhanging trees and the looming rainforest above, and sparkling with a layer of constantly shifting diamond droplets as the rain gently pattered its surface. it was warm, and swimming in it felt like a deeply cleansing experience… it also was a deeply cleansing experience for me personally, because I hadn’t showered since the night before we left for the island, so I was hitting t-minus 3 days without shower…
- our final lunch, made up from the scraps of what had survived the weekend in the slowly warming eskies- cheese sandwiches, stuffed with roughly hewn chunks of pepper and tomato and onion on flabby bread may not have been up to gourmet standards, but it tasted good shared amongst new friends, all chewing contentedly in companionable silence, whilst watching kookaburras flit from tree to tree and sheltering from the occasional gentle fat raindrops that had started to fall that morning and hadn’t quite let up.

right, so that was the highlights of Fraser Island. i am not including how good the long hot shower was when we got back to the hostel, or how good it was to lie on a bed, or how good the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet I snuffled out was, or how nice it was to share laughs and cold beers (instead of warm goon) in the hostel bar with the remnants of the tour on our returning evening. these were all après-highlights of their very own. we are now all facebook friends and i do hope they all stay in touch- it was a quality group, and without a doubt it was not just the stunning landscape which made our Fraser Island experience so special and memorable for me, but also the people we shared it with.

we left Hervey Bay before breakfast the next morning, with the 2 massive uneaten boxes of supermarket own brand cereal added to our baggage, and a grateful (if slightly hungover) Will on our backseat who was also headed to Byron Bay. the morning of driving passed slowly and sweatily as the humidity crept up, but we eventually got to our Arts Factory destination by late lunch time. on arrival we realised that the strange coincidence of me smelling goon every time I rolled down my window (prompting the ever quotable turn of phrase “Everything smells of goon!”), was unfortunately no coincidence but rather a small tragedy. our second goon, half full and salvaged from the island had exploded in the boot of the beautiful shiny red hire car. I think it may have been the Gods of Fraser Island punishing us for not finishing all 8.4 litres on the island- it is pretty unheard of to bring booze back from the island i believe. it was sad and smelly and sticky, but gave us the name for hire car number 2 which we had been struggling with somewhat- goodbye Grover, but hello Goon!

after checking in to our ‘island retreat’ room, which was a tiny square and scrappy static tent on a board walk above the swamp, and had looked so romantic in the pictures but was lacking somewhat in space and protection from the elements, we dealt with the pressing issue of the soggy contents of the boot, and got on with our number one priority- booking in some scuba time. with dives organised for the duration of our time in Byron, the skies greying over, and the worrying realisation that we had crossed a time zone some while back on the motorway and lost an hour, we decided to make the most of what was left of the afternoon and took Will (also at a loss as to what to do and equally shocked to have lost an hour of his life between Queensland and New South Wales) and went for a drive to the nearby and legendary town of Nimbin. to be honest, Nimbin was a bit of a disappointment, but perhaps that was because with losing an hour, and underestimating how long it would take us to get there on the curling indirect roads, we arrived as everything was shutting up. it seemed to me like a sad little town that has been stuck in a timewarp since the 1970s when a music festival was held there and after which no-one seemed to go home. it is certainly quirky as hell- hemp museum, fat old aboriginies selling Bob Marley T-shirts on the road, and happy dreadlocked ladies conducting yoga lessons in the middle of the pavement on a scrappy bit of carpet- and worth a visit, but after a quick wander round and a refreshing pint in the pub we decided to head back to Byron cross country (ie, on the little dotted roads on the map rather than the major pink ‘local link roads’ which had bought us to Nimbin, and had not seemed very major at all). the countryside surrounding Byron and Nimbin is almost shockingly green for Australia, and its rolling hills, undulating pastures and narrow winding roads made into tunnels by the thick canopies of overhead trees are eerily reminiscient of being back in Dorset. as i was pondering this, the reality of our location was brought back into sharp focus as a massive kangaroo stepped out from the bushes into the same narrow winding road that minutes earlier i had been commenting could have been in Burton Bradstock. there ain’t no kangaroos in Burton Bradstock! we slowed instantly, and the strange looking creature gave us a sceptical glance and bounced off into the undergrowth, very unhurriedly and very unfussed by the sudden appearance of Goon in his path.

we got back to our ‘room’ well after it had got dark, and the shortcomings of the island retreat were suddenly very apparent now we were no longer distracted by goon soaked belongings and the pressing need to book our diving for the following morning. the space inside the tent was just big enough to house the double bed in there, and if you squeezed up against the canvas you could just about tip-toe round the side, but there was certainly no place to put our massive backpacks, let alone open them and sort through our things which we badly needed to do. the lack of any kind of seal to the tent was also a bit of a worry, given that we were in a swamp, and surrounded by snakes, spiders, lizards and all manner of nasty Australian things that like to bite people. we organised to move to a ‘cube’ room the following day- much less romantic sounding than the island retreat, but given its solid floor and walls, light, fan, fridge and floorspace, it would be heaven! and we gave it one night in the island retreat tent, for the hell of it, to be big brave campers, and seeing as we were already there.

any doubts i had about our decision to make the move were instantly removed when we heard the ‘Spider Tour’ coming round the island at about 10.30pm, a few hours later. the guide, Cockatoo Paul, stopped directly outside the back of our tent, and i clearly heard him say “wow, bonzer” (or some such similar aussie turn of phrase last heard on Neighbours circa 1989) “look at this massive woofy. she’s pregnant, about ready to pop i should say, and soon she’ll have hundreds of little babies.”.
i had no idea what type of spider a ‘woofy’ was, how big counted as ‘massive’ and whether ‘soon’ meant within the next 10 hours.
i had no real desire to find out.
“is everyone ok?”, Cockatoo Paul continued, “no-one’s too freaked out by how massive the spider is? good, okay then, we’ll continue on there’s loads more biting spiders just around here.”. Cockatoo Paul did not hear me quietly murmuring to myself from the other side of the tent “no… i’m not ok… i’m a little freaked out… ”. needless to say, we had a slightly restless nights sleep, and when the husband got up at 6.30am to go on the first dive of the day i stayed awake, and shifted our stuff to the car as soon as it seemed reasonable, and killed the time before i went to the dive school myself for the second dive in the kitchen block making a long meal out of some homebrand cereal. that afternoon when our new room was cleaned and ready for us to move in, i can safely say that i have never been so pleased to be given a key to a plain concrete block of a room. island retreat? pah, give me a cube any day!

I’ve had a pause in writing since i started this episode of the blog, and so, where I began typing in an oasis of calm in the middle of nowhere, I am now finishing this from the passenger seat of Goon, listening to heavy rock bands on the stereo as we wend our way away down the highway, away from Byron and towards Sydney. i loved Byron, and i loved the Arts Factory. the place had a real heart and soul, and real character- it felt like an old school backpackers where everyone, young and old, dive nut, hippy and surfer, was accepted and just rubbed along happily together. it went far too quickly- mornings spent diving, afternoons spent lazing in the sun by the pool, and evenings drinking our third goon out of paper cups and listening to chirruping cicadas and enthusiastic, if not always tuneful, singing from circles of backpackers who seemed to congregate as if by some unspoken agreement nightly by the lake after the sun went down.
the diving in the day was really good, and we got to see a huge number of grey nurse sharks, wobbygong sharks (one of which I mistakenly kneed in the head, because i didn’t see it swimming under me- only afterwards was i told that the wobbygong is the only shark that can turn back on itself to bite, and i could have got a nip in exchange for my knee-ing.), turtles, bat rays and eagle rays, puffer fish and all kinds of other things that are only exciting to divers (nudibranch anyone? thought not!).
on our last day we attempted to see some wildlife above sea level rather than below, we broke with our little pattern (eat, dive, sleep, eat, sleep, repeat) and headed out as the heat left the sun to hunt for the elusive platypus in a dam about halfway between Byron and Nimbin. we didn’t find any platypi, but on the drive there we saw more kangaroos which we stopped to watch and who entertained us greatly, and we also spotted a fat koala up a tree at the side of the road which we watched for a while (less entertaining than the skippies actually- it barely moved in 5 minutes, apart from to very slowly, almost imperceptibly, to stretch its little furry arm out to grab a branch of eucalyptus. we left before it moved its little furry arm back, but i suspect that may have taken another 5 or 10 minutes). so 2 out of 3 iconic aussie animals spotted in the wild felt like a successful trip, and on the way back we stopped at a lovely restaurant called Fishheads, (changing out of tramping gear and in to something a little smarter in the carpark!) for a bit of a gourmet dinner in a sweet little town called Bangalow. a great bottle of Riesling, complimentary bloody mary oyster shot, seared scallops and pancetta, and a fillet steak later, and i was pretty ready for a peaceful nights sleep in our cube!

so that about wraps up Australia so far. as i said we are now on the road to Sydney, where we are staying 5 whole days to allow time to soak up the delights of the city, catch up with some friends and generally prepare ourselves for Africa. i will try and blog again before we leave, but from everything i’ve heard about Sydney it may well keep us on our toes! for now, i will just say g’day!